Endgame Redux Ethan
Should he be afraid? He was about to die, it was going to hurt for a second—hurt pretty bad if he had to guess—but then he was going to wake up tomorrow, same as ever, wasn’t he? He wouldn’t remember tonight. Wouldn’t remember all that he’d learned.
Wouldn’t be any closer to getting free of this place. But he’d be alive. Right?
The creature from the desert moved faster than anything on two legs should be able to move. The feathers of its wings hissed through the air. And as it came nearer, Ethan felt an unfamiliar emotion rising in his chest. It wasn’t fear.
It was rage.
Twenty-four years he’d been trapped in a shithole town, chained to a dying car shop.
Twenty-four years he’d been beholden to a mother with brilliant technical skills and no business sense, always in the shadow of a useless brother who seemed determined to break all their hearts.
Twenty-four years and Ethan had finally gotten a break, a chance to escape.
Twenty-four years, and this is what it came to? Being trapped, yet again, in a hell of someone else’s making?
Ethan did something he’d never done before.
He opened his mouth. He screamed at the creature bearing down on him. He screamed in absolute, impotent fury.
And then the thing stopped.
The Guardian loomed above Ethan and Kyla, mere feet away, but it didn’t move any closer.
Ethan’s first thought was that he’d startled the thing into submission, maybe stopped time itself with the sheer force of his anger.
Hardly. The Guardian blinked, regarded him impassively.
Its feathered chest rose and fell. Its scaly head bobbed, softly, on its serpentine neck.
The creature let out a low hiss. It almost sounded like a question.
Ethan became aware of a pulse in his hand. He opened the fingers of his clenched fist and revealed the grooved stone egg he’d taken from his pocket a moment ago. The egg was trembling on his palm.
The Guardian peered at the stone and gave a soft bob of the head. It seemed satisfied.
Kyla realized what this meant. She didn’t waste time.
She scrambled sideways, reaching under a nearby booth to pluck up the egg she’d dropped when they’d fallen to the floor.
She thrust the stone in the creature’s direction, panting hard, and after a moment’s regard, the Guardian took a step back.
Another. It closed its talons. It turned its scaly head to study the fire rapidly approaching them from the kitchen.
The creature held out one arm and one wing in the direction of the cafe’s broken window. It didn’t move, even as the fire crept closer.
Ethan rose to his feet, knees shaking with surplus adrenaline.
He helped Kyla stand. Smoke was filling the room, choking them both, doing wonders for his headache.
His heart hammered. The human body wasn’t designed to stand this close to a creature this terrifying.
He didn’t have the fortitude to look at it for more than a second at a time.
He said to Kyla, “I think it’s waiting for us to leave. ”
Kyla looked at the grooved stone still trembling in her hand. “I guess we figured out what these are for.”
Outside, a man screamed. The Guardian remained motionless as Ethan and Kyla picked their way through the cafe’s shattered window and out onto the porch. Ryan Phan was on the porch, pounding their way, a pair of Guardians SHRIEKING on his heels.
Ryan held a gun in one hand. In the other, Ethan saw something pale and white.
“The stone!” Ethan shouted. “Show them the stone!”
Ryan looked at him, clearly bewildered by the instruction, and his foot caught a loose board in the porch. He fell to his knees with a shout. He tried to tumble away from the approaching creatures—but they were on him already. There was no escape.
Except they hesitated, inches from his body. When Ryan rolled onto his back, he was holding up the egg.
With a low hiss, the Guardians registered this. They nodded. They stepped away.
Ryan looked at the egg, at the creatures, at Ethan. “What in the fuck?”
“Fernanda,” Kyla said. “Where is she?”
Ryan’s face fell.
With a grunt of pain, he rose to his feet. There was something wrong with his shoulder. In the moonlight, Ethan saw the black leather of his jacket was wet.
Ryan was bleeding, badly.
“Something happened, didn’t it?” Ethan said.
Ryan let out a slow breath. “Follow me.”
The Guardians stepped out of their way as Ethan and Kyla followed Ryan down the porch.
He led them to the covered walkway, where two corpses waited for them.
Fernanda was slumped against the wall near the supply room’s door, a long streak of blood and hair spread along the wall above her.
She had fallen forward enough for Ethan to see the hilt of a knife sticking from her back.
Fernanda’s eyes were wide with sadness. Fear.
Stanley Holiday was across the porch from her, sprawled on his back through room 3’s open side door. Two red craters had opened in the man’s chest. Fernanda’s gun was in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said to Kyla. Nodding to Fernanda and the wound to his own shoulder, he said, “Stanley got loose somehow. He got the jump on us.”
Ethan said, “Thomas, probably. It sounds like he blew up the kitchen and the generator while he was at it. Tabitha was right—he’s scared of changing anything.”
“It may not have been entirely his idea,” Ryan said. “I swear, for a second when I turned around, it wasn’t like I saw Stanley standing here, but that other guy. The weird fucker who showed up at midnight.”
“Jack Allen,” Kyla said. She took a deep breath, and Ethan could hear the tears in it. She crouched down near Fernanda, shut the woman’s eyes. “I thought I could save her tonight.”
“There’s always tomorrow, yeah?” Ryan said.
“Hopefully. Unless Thomas is right, and we’ve already ruined the ceremony.”
Behind them, the mountain moaned and shook the earth. Ryan shivered. “In that case, there won’t be a tomorrow for anybody, right? Sort of consoling.”
Kyla stood, shaking her head. She looked at Stanley’s corpse, bent down to take the gun from his hand. “I still don’t get it. I don’t get why Jack Allen is so set on killing all of us. He said last night that we were standing in his way. But standing in the way of what?”
Ryan said, “He’s just fucking crazy. He got stuck here back in the fifties, right? That’ll break anyone. I saw it all the time in Huntsville: keep a man trapped for long enough and they’ll lose themselves in a hurry.”
“It feels more complicated than that,” Ethan said. He saw another flash of a memory,
feels himself on the floor of the old house. Hears Jack Allen say,
“I will be granted audience once more.”
Ethan rubbed his head. The memory was gone, but he knew what it meant. “Kyla’s right. Jack Allen’s got some kind of agenda. He’s getting something by killing all of us. He might even be strengthening the thing in the mountain, just like Tabitha thought.”
The mountain moaned again, the sound almost trampling them.
Kyla said, “I don’t want to know what a man like Jack Allen could do with a thing like that.”
“And somehow, Sarah’s death is the key to all of it.”
“If we don’t figure out a way to expose that film, I don’t think we’ll ever know what happened to her,” Kyla said. “And if we don’t figure that out, we might be stuck here—”
Ryan gave her his best sly smile. It was almost impressive, considering how much pain he was clearly in. He nodded to the supply room. “I really need to talk to you about the film you found hidden in here last night.”
A great pop and crash echoed from the cafe behind them. A tongue of flame lapped through its shattered window. Ethan said, “Let’s talk about it somewhere else.”
The fire was growing: they could hear it spreading through the cafe, a hot roar.
As Ethan led them to the end of the porch, he studied the motel’s roof, the wooden railings of the porch.
He thought of the shop in Ellersby, the sun climbing over the highway, the smoke in his rearview mirror as his whole life went up in flames.
He thought of the resolve he’d felt. The certainty that he was about to start his life over.
He felt it again now.
Ethan led the way into the motel’s office.
It was pitch-dark, the air thick with the warning smell of smoke.
Ryan pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket and gave it a click.
Surrounded by a little bubble of light, the three of them stepped over Jack Allen’s corpse.
Over the lake of blood around Hunter. Over Hunter.
In the back of the office, they found the walnut door that had loomed there from the beginning. It was still locked. Ethan could hear scratching and shuffling from the other side. To Kyla again, he said, “Did you say Jack Allen opened this door last night?”
“Yeah. One of those things is on the other side. It killed Thomas and Tabitha.”
To Ryan, Ethan said, “Do you still have the key you took from his pocket?”
Ryan dug around in the pockets of his jacket and produced a shiny brass key. Before he handed it over, he said, “Why do you want to open this door? We got lucky with the other Guardians. Are we sure the stone eggs will work with this one?”
Ethan felt another memory flit through his mind. When it passed, he nodded. “Jack Allen had one of the eggs in his pocket, remember? It kept him safe.”
“But still…”
“He unlocked this door for a reason. I think I know why.”
Another hesitation, and Ryan passed over the key.
The three of them pulled the eggs from their pockets before Ethan slipped the key in the lock. The creature on the other side went quiet at the sound. From the direction of the cafe, the fire caved in a wall.
Ethan turned the key.